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About ZAAI

Applied AI Engineering for Enterprise Operations

ZAAI builds production-grade intelligent systems that work inside your operations: connected to your ERP, your banks, your supply chain, and your customer data.

What We Do

We have deployed demand forecasting engines that manage 2,000+ simultaneous time series. Financial automation systems that reconcile 135,000 transactions per year. Autonomous agents that run complex workflows without human intervention. Computer vision pipelines that transform raw video into structured analytics.

Across 11 industries (from FMCG and manufacturing to banking and sports technology), we solve operational problems that cost real money. Not with dashboards. Not with POCs that never ship. With production systems that learn, decide, and act.

Every project follows the same structure: data quality assessment first, MVP delivery within 12 to 16 weeks, phased contracts so you evaluate before committing further, and knowledge transfer built into every engagement. 100% production deployment rate.

Principles

Operator-first

Our founder ran supply chains, managed demand planning, and deployed AI in operations. We understand what a stockout costs, not just how to reduce MAPE.

Production or nothing

100% production deployment rate. Every project includes monitoring, retraining strategies, and handover. A model that doesn't ship is a waste of money.

De-risk everything

Research phases for novel architectures. Phased contracts. MVP-first delivery. Gated milestones. You never commit before seeing results.

Knowledge transfer built in

Training sessions, documentation, shadow model participation, and hypercare stabilization. No vendor lock-in.

Team

The people behind ZAAI.

Luís Roque

Founder & Partner

Luís founded ZAAI in Porto in early 2023, after more than a decade building AI products and leading data teams at scale. He is VP of Data & AI at Marley Spoon, and he previously co-founded HUUB, a logistics technology company he led as CEO through its acquisition by Maersk.

He is a PhD researcher at the AI & Computer Science Lab of the University of Porto. His work has been published at AAAI and KDD, two of the top AI research conferences worldwide, including "Cherry-picking in time series forecasting" at AAAI 2025 and "RHiOTS: a framework for evaluating hierarchical time series forecasting algorithms" at KDD 2024. He wrote the "Deep Learning for Time Series Cookbook", published by Packt.

He also builds companies of his own. Nixar, TUTAI, and Liftter all grew out of the same operating playbook that powers ZAAI Ventures.

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Rúben Pedrosa

COO

8+ years in B2B sales and partnerships across e-commerce and fashion. Former roles at Platforme, ebankIT, and Fast White Cat. Rúben runs ZAAI's go-to-market and owns the enterprise client relationships across 11 industries.

LinkedIn

Timeline

  1. 2023

    ZAAI incorporated in Porto

    Incorporated in early 2023. First ML project delivered the same year: network topology prediction for telecom infrastructure, with zero-shot and few-shot learning models integrated into the client's existing GUI.

  2. 2024

    Expansion to FMCG, e-commerce, and media

    On-shelf availability prediction for a major beverage distributor. Content recommendation for a national newspaper. MLOps infrastructure for e-commerce.

  3. 2025

    Horizon and Pliney launched

    10+ projects across 11 industries. Horizon and Pliney products launched. Manufacturing, banking, fashion, and sports verticals added.

  4. 2026

    Platform expansion & SaaS deployment

    SaaS deployment model for Horizon and Pliney. Sports analytics and banking verticals in production. Engineering engagements across 4 continents.

Let's talk.

Tell us about the decision you're trying to make. We'll tell you whether Horizon, Pliney, or a Custom AI Solution fits, or whether it's none of the above.

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